Den Tandt: On our Afghan past, and our soldiers’ future

Michael Den Tandt, Postmedia News03.12.2014

From left, Master Cpl. Daniel Choong, Cpl. Harry Smiley and Cpl . Gavin Early take down the Canadian flag for the last time in Afghanistan on Wednesday, bringing an end to 12 years of military involvement.Murray Brewster/THE CANADIAN PRESS
/ Postmedia News

The flag at Archbishop Joseph MacNeil is raised during a ceremony to honour the end of Canada?s military service in Afghanistan,on March 12, 2014 in Edmonton. Greg Southam/Edmonton JournalGreg Southam/Edmonton Journal
/ Postmedia News

There are three questions worth asking about the Afghan mission, which lasted 12 years and claimed the lives of 162 Canadians — 158 soldiers, two aid workers, a diplomat and a journalist: Were we right to go? Can we be proud of what our country did there? And are we right to leave, though the war is anything but won?

The answers, perhaps paradoxically, are yes, yes and yes.

It is easy today, with the mission long off front pages, to forget the spirit that animated it at the outset. It was in 2005 that the decision was taken — by Prime Minister Paul Martin, Defence Minister Bill Graham and Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier — to put Canadians in Kandahar in significant numbers. There had been important Canadian military engagement in Afghanistan since 2002; but the conflict hit the public consciousness in earnest in early 2006, when it suddenly became widely apparent our soldiers were in a shooting war.

Should they not have been there? There was spirited debate, with armchair strategists citing the long historical record of failed military adventures in Afghanistan by various empires. There has been much discussion of why Martin agreed to put Canada in the volatile and dangerous south, rather than the east or north. Was it Hillier who drove that? Was it Martin’s desire to appease and impress the Bush administration with Canada’s martial worth?

The bottom line, it seemed to me then and seems to me now, is that one way or another Canada was right to go because our closest allies went, in great numbers, and for a just cause; initially because the perpetrators of the killings of thousands of civilians on 9/11 had been harboured by the Afghan Taliban regime; secondly because, given a choice between trying to help the Afghans rebuild, and not trying, it was right to try. Someone had to stand post in Kandahar. It is to Canada’s great credit that our soldiers did.

So, question two: Yes, we should be proud of what they did there. Critics will say the mission was tarnished by the detainee scandal, which saw Afghan prisoners turned over to the tender mercies of Afghan government security forces, who mistreated and tortured them. That did tarnish the mission, badly. In particular the Harper government’s incompetent attempts to deflect the detainee allegations, when they first emerged, tarnished the mission.

But the decision not to establish Canadian-run Afghan prisons — realistically, the only way of ensuring prisoners were treated according to Canadian standards — was not taken by soldiers. Soldiers had to deal with the consequences of that decision. I remember speaking with a Canadian doctor at the medical centre at Kandahar Airfield, on my second trip there in the fall of 2007, about the counter-intuitive practice of treating wounded insurgent battlefield prisoners, under guard, then setting them free once they were able to walk. There was no place to keep them, she told me. Was that her fault? No.

Meanwhile, I and many other witnesses routinely saw Canadian soldiers risk life and limb to deliver aid and provide security to aid workers, and ordinary Afghans. For teachers, doctors, merchants, the international mission was a lifeline. Among the greatest scandals of the war politically, in my view, was the way in which the Liberal party, having decided to send more troops in 2005, promptly turned tail in 2006, after it fell from power — leaving the Harper government to carry the can alone until after the Manley Report in 2008, which led to a semblance of bipartisanship. Canada’s Afghan war was never a “combat mission,” as it was so often described. It was a reconstruction mission in which there was much combat, which is not the same thing.

All of which leads to question three: If all of the above is true, how can we be right to leave? The answer, though sad, is brutally simple. There is a shelf-life on any military engagement, however noble its aims, in a democratic society. In 2008 it was already apparent the clock was ticking and that the ultimate arbiter of success would be the Afghan government, and its willingness or ability to professionalize the Afghan National Police, crack down on internal corruption, and sideline the drug lords within its own ranks, among other challenges. Instead President Hamid Karzai dawdled, and in fact began regularly speaking of the international mission as though it were an occupation. If one examines the timing, that was the beginning of the end.

More than 40,000 Canadians served in the mission that ended this week. Many of them came home wounded, visibly or invisibly. Rather than endlessly parse the question of whether they should have gone, it’s time we paid much more attention to how they’re faring now. Are you listening, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Minister Julian Fantino? Soldiers did their job, it was a hard job, and that job is over. Now we should do ours.

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